Lyme Disease for Life?

For an estimated 20,000 Americans each year, the symptoms above culminate in a diagnosis of Lyme disease -- an inflammatory bacterial illness transmitted by the bite of a deer tick.

Fortunately for the vast majority of Lyme disease sufferers, two to four weeks worth of antibiotic therapy is enough to spur a total recovery from the illness.

But a very small number of patients report a much more serious struggle with the illness.

Brooke Landau, a traffic reporter for the ABC News affiliate KGTV in San Diego, was one of these patients.

"I literally went to bed fine one night and woke up unable to move from the waist down and the neck up and had no idea why," she told ABC's "Good Morning America."

By the time Landau was diagnosed, she said the disease had taken a toll on her hearing, her eyesight -- and it had infected nearly every organ in her body.

When conventional treatments didn't work, her condition led her to an experimental therapy, one not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The treatment involved pumping high doses of antibiotics directly into her heart, 24 hours a day for two months. She also underwent 30 days of treatment in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.

For Landau, the treatment may have worked; she recently received her first negative test results for the bacteria in a decade.

But the very existence of such unapproved treatments for the disease has opened an ideological gulf when it comes to treating patients who, unlike Landau, went through conventional therapy for Lyme disease, only to report that they still suffer its effects years afterward.

On one side are physicians and other practitioners who support approaches including extended courses of antibiotics.

And on the other are the majority of Lyme disease experts, who tend to discredit the long-term continuation of the disease after a normal course of therapy. Dr. John Halperin, chair of the Department of Neurosciences at Overlook Hospital in Summit, N.J., is one such expert.

"Some have referred to patients who have persistent but nonspecific symptoms following appropriate treatment for Lyme disease, as having 'chronic Lyme disease,'" Halperin said. "There is no scientific evidence that these patients are still infected, or that prolonged antibiotic therapy or other treatments are helpful in these individuals.

"There are now multiple studies showing that long-term antibiotics offer no benefit to these patients but carry significant risk."

"The evidence base in the peer-reviewed medical literature... for long-term antitibiotics is meager," Edlow said. "However some believe -- in the absence of high quality evidence, that long-term antibiotics are useful."

Acute Lyme vs. Chronic Lyme

By the time most people learned that President Bush had been treated for an acute case of Lyme disease, the diagnosis was little more than a footnote in his medical records.

Like Bush, most of those who are exposed to Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterial culprit of the disease, are never at any grave health risk.

However, only about 30 percent of those infected get the obvious signs of Lyme: a bulls-eye rash and flu-like symptoms.